Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/87

 undissolved natural organism, the natural, as every experienced gourmet knows, having a relish hardly impartable to the mere fundamentally laboratorial product. But as to all this, what, in goodness' name, would my venerable ancestor aforesaid have thought, if he could have foreseen his far-off descendant, a thousand years on, dealing in such articles, as part of his stock in trade in the great provision line!

Necessity and, as I have said, good common sense have now settled our practice as to disposal of the dead. Public law enjoins that they be disposed of to the best advantage for the benefit of the living. We can't bury them; we can't burn them; what are we to do with them? Why simply this, that we sell them, and to the highest bidder, because he is presumably the party most likely to put them to the promptest and fullest use. The funeral, and all that is dolorous, end, in fact, at the public auction mart, where cheerful competition and business begins, and where the lot is at once cleared off. The miscellaneous buyer is ever solemnly enjoined, even in his contract note, to cut and carve with all due reverence; and a large and ready charity hopes that he always does so. If bereaved and sorrowing friends are tempted, in the first excesses of grief, to buy-in the body, they soon experience no end of inconvenience and bother with the suspicious sanitary authorities, ever on the scent at such intermeddling, lest an unwholesome nuisance should be created in the neighbourhood. Thus all find it best, with their dead, to acquiesce in the regular routine, and to have their solid consolation in the pecuniary proceeds from the public roup.

And indeed, when the mind has once quitted its